Special Report on concerns at anti-LRA campaign

With the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) still operating inside Sudan in pursuit of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), people in Acholiland, northern Uganda, the area which has suffered most from the LRA rebellion, are anxiously awaiting news of freed captives. Uganda had made clear that its military campaign in Eastern Equatoria, southern Sudan, was designed to destroy the LRA while also securing the release of thousands of abducted children, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) stated earlier this month, in expressing grave concern over the fate of children caught up in the fighting. The Ugandan and Sudanese governments said that, in cooperating to tackle the common security threat posed by the LRA, they would "spare no efforts to safeguard and maintain the safety of innocent civilians", and would seek the safe repatriation of abducted children. [see http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=27052] Humanitarian agencies in Gulu and Kitgum (northern Ugandan districts which, along with Pader, form the area known as Acholiland) are understood to have drawn up contingency arrangements based on the possibility of 4,000 or more ex-LRA combatants (perhaps 1,000 adults and the remainder mostly children) arriving in the north of the country. According to the Abducted Child Registration and Information System (ACRIS) set up by UNICEF and the government of Uganda, some 9,818 children under the age of 18 have been abducted since the LRA war began, or about one third of the total of 28,217 recorded abductions. However, the conflict and displacement researcher Chris Dolan - who has done considerable work on the effects of the LRA insurgency in northern Uganda - suggests that, with some 10 percent of those abducted becoming adults in the years following their abduction and a reintegration rate of 88 percent of more, fewer than 1,000 child abductees remain to be returned and reintegrated. Although there is an additional unknown number of children born in LRA camps, "the figures raise a huge question mark over the widely publicised claim that children make up 90 percent of the LRA," according to Dolan. [see http://www.c-r.org/accord/accord11/children.htm] He calls for much more attention on "the extreme needs of the children who live in the affected districts of northern Uganda as a whole", where, he says, 99.8 percent of the child population left behind experience a daily catalogue of major forms of abuse. "The emphasis on the LRA’s child soldiers can at times seem disproportionate to the other interventions which are required if cycles of violence are to be broken, raising the question of why northern Uganda’s 'other youth' (those not abducted by the LRA) should not have been given more attention," he adds. [see "Northern youths lament unimaginable misery" and other previous reports at:http://irinnews.org/frontpage.asp SelectRegion=East_Africa&SelectCountry=Uganda] Figures quoted by UNICEF suggest that over 5,500 children abducted by the LRA, born into it or who have grown into it from local communities in southern Sudan are still missing and, in early April, the agency reiterated its stand that the LRA "must unconditionally release the children it has abducted over the years to serve as soldiers, porters and sex slaves." Thus far, few if any of the LRA child abductees - whichever estimates are used - have shown up in south Sudan or Uganda as a result of the UPDF campaign in south Sudan, and many in northern Uganda oppose their government’s military approach to addressing the LRA insurgency. This was particularly the case among Acholi elders who held a conference in Kitgum on 3-4 April and at the launch in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, on 9 April of "Protracted Conflict, Elusive Peace", edited by Okello Lucima. The elders expressed the fear that intensified conflict with the LRA would either lead directly to the death of Acholi children, or that they would become lost in the forests of southern Sudan and die of hunger or thirst. Instead, they called for the government to follow up its amnesty offer more vigorously, for reconciliation with the LRA and an end to Ugandan support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) - which they said was responsible for past assistance by the Government of Sudan to the LRA. The Ugandan government's Amnesty Commission should have an important role to play in assisting ex-combatants reintegrate in Ugandan society "in order to ensure a durable solution" to the problems of insurgency and insecurity, according to humanitarian sources in Kampala. In a separate development at the Kitgum conference, Catholic Archbishop of Gulu John Baptist Odema accused the SPLA of attacking LRA escapees in south Sudan, a contention that Riek Jerebou, the SPLA representative to Uganda, has vehemently rejected. Jerebou pointed out that southern Sudanese civilians had also been, and continue to be, victims of LRA attacks. The UPDF has publicly asked the SPLA not to use the opportunity provided by its incursion into Sudan to launch attacks on Government of Sudan positions, but military sources within Uganda told IRIN that it was known the SPLA had been asked to help find and turn over any LRA escapees. While much of the focus of the UPDF venture into Sudan has been on the to free children, many Uganda observers - including Odema, Dolan and others - contend that the Ugandan army is recruiting children for the anti-LRA campaign. They also say that units of the Local Defense Units (LDUs), paramilitary militias which are supposed to look after security within their local areas, have been taken to Sudan. These contentions are extremely difficult to prove and the Ugandan government has strongly denied them. Although the LRA was an outgrowth of the dissident indigenous movement of Alice Lakwena in the mid-1980s, by 1995 it began operating from Sudan with the support of Khartoum as it sought to get back at Uganda for its support of the SPLA, in a case of what one academic in Uganda's Makerere University has called "the politics of spite". LRA operations have included the killing and abduction of civilians, and the looting of people's goods and destruction of their homes, to the extent that humanitarian officials have described its operations as a war against the civilian population and not the Kampala government. By the late 1990s the LRA had turned much of Acholiland into a war zone and forced more than 400,000 people, predominantly peasant farmers, into government "protected villages", where they continue to live in conditions of some squalor. Until recently, even these villages did not provide complete security and the LRA regularly took captives, pillaged property and laid mines on the roads, according to Ugandan observers. However, conditions began to change in the wake of the 11 September terror attacks on the US, the Washington-led international coalition against terrorism and its depiction of the LRA as a terrorist organisation. This, in turn, was instrumental in the government of Sudan ending its support of the organisation, according to diplomatic sources. Also, with the UPDF’s partial withdrawal of troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Museveni opted to devote more attention to resolving the problem of the LRA insurgency, according to analysts. Although an amnesty bill was enacted granting those LRA fighters who surrendered immunity, critics – mostly Acholi – accuse Museveni of being committed to a military approach despite 16 years of its failure. Against this background observers note that the ruling Movement for National Resistance (MNR), which has its roots in the south and west of the country, has always looked with suspicion on the north, which not only produced Alice Lakwena and LRA leader Kony, but is also associated with the previous regimes of Idi Amin, Milton Obote and Basilio and Tito Okello. Moreover, northern insecurity and southern dominance of the government has meant marginalisation and under-development in the north which finds expression, if rarely open support, in the LRA rebellion, according to many - including a senior government official from the north. Jim Adams, the World Bank’s country director for Tanzania and Uganda from 1995 until March 2002, recently told IRIN that the Ugandan government must deal with the security issues in the north. However, it must also develop stronger relationships with NGOs, churches and community-based organisations that have been doing most of the development activities, and the communities themselves, in order to generate investment, provide infrastructure and have development efforts make progress, he added. [see http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=27076] Without this, according to Acholi MP Norbert Mao, "discontent in northern Uganda is a threat to the security of all Uganda." In contrast, many southern Ugandans hold that northern based armies wreaked havoc in much of the country until the MNR’s victory in 1986 and are unsympathetic to the plight of northerners. The Acholi typically see the LRA problem as solely a local concern but Museveni's government views the issue in broader terms of regional relations and the ongoing, though still hesitant, reconciliation between his government and that of Sudanese President Umar Hasan al-Bashir, according to regional analysts. While Museveni's government has called for Kony and other LRA leaders to be tried as war criminals, Acholi elders call for negotiations with the LRA, reconciliation and re-integration of the rebels into the community. That said, a US diplomat in the region says there is little indication that the LRA wants negotiations, since it does not have a political programme beyond calling for the ouster of Museveni, and said he considered Kony "a maniac". The same diplomat still felt that Acholi society did have both the desire and capacity to reintegrate the LRA. This view was also held by priests operating in the protected villages of northern Uganda, who told IRIN that the major obstacle did not lie with the mainstream community but with LRA fighters who bear considerable guilt for their crimes. The Ugandan army operation in Sudan has now continued for more than a week longer than the initial period granted the UPDF by the government of Sudan. With no major battles having taken place and the LRA retreating deeper into Sudan, a military solution seems ever more elusive, according to observers in northern Uganda. If the military option fails, as many expect it to - including some in the Kampala government - Museveni may be unable to keep his promise to end LRA terrorism and the problematic system of "protected villages" for displaced people by May, and the Acholi cry for a negotiated peace and amnesty could become louder.